As funders we often talk about supporting movements – the environmental movement, women’s movement, etc. Yet how do we do that? What does it mean to support a movement with grants?
We can learn from movements that have been successful in the past. The civil rights movement in the United States is a classic example. We all know this person:
That’s Rosa Parks, and her story is famous. Tired after work one day, she was finally fed up and refused to go to the back of the bus. She wound up getting arrested, and as the churches rallied around her, the Montgomery bus boycott got started and achieved an early and important victory for the civil rights movement.
Great story, inspiring. The only problem with it is that it’s not true. In fact Rosa Parks was Secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter, and had just returned from a few weeks training at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, famous for its training of community organizers. While her choice not to move that day was spontaneous, it was supported by her training, and by a group named the Montgomery Improvement Association, composed of local activists and ministers, which saw an opportunity and organized the boycott. Other people had been arrested for the same offense, but no organized action developed to support them. She was chosen as an upstanding citizen with an unblemished record, and much of the boycott had been discussed in advance.
That is – there was a whole movement behind this one individual. The story of the individual who stands up and says no more is inspiring to us, but it rarely achieves much with a whole set of organizations, plans, campaigns, and leadership behind it.
Which is precisely the problem with figuring out how to support a movement with grants. Movements are by definition messy, with many different community groups, non-profit organizations, academics, government officials, media, etc. all acting at times together, at times at cross purposes, at times against each other. The following chart gives a quick sense of how confusing the whole movement was at the time.
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was the face of many practicing civil disobedience, while the Black Panthers were willing to use violence as a tool.
President Kennedy told activists he was sympathetic, they just needed to move more slowly so as not to alienate moderates. Others pursued legal strategies, and the Supreme Court came to be a major player. The list goes on. Who to fund?
It helps a lot to have a simple conceptual framework of what successful movements do. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your homework and figure out who’s who, who’s with you and against you, and what the right timing is. But a conceptual framework will provide you with a mental structure to hang all these confusing elements on. Here’s one that has worked very well for me.
Successful movements do three things:
- Build movement infrastructure and mobilize resources
- Reframe the debate
- Take advantage of opportunities
Let’s break these down a bit to see what they mean.
1. Build movement infrastructure and mobilize resources
To operate effectively, movements need:
- Organizations
- Networks
- Funding
- Volunteers
These are the resources, people and connections that do the work, that bring in new people, that develop contacts with media, government officials, for-profit companies, etc. Sometimes these are community based organizations, sometimes new forms of sustainable business, sometimes connections and networks.
A great example is the National Coalition on Mining in Ghana. Over about ten years, a diverse collection of community based organizations, local, national and international NGOs, and national and international networks developed to promote the interests of local communities affected by mining. This coalition also promoted the public interest at national level by ensuring the mining revenue benefited the nation as a whole. The basic structure of the movement is illustrated here.
Creating this infrastructure took hundreds of people and dozens of organizations. Multiple donors made over 40 grants to a variety of types of organizations for across the spectrum of possible strategies over a decade. The result is that after a decade, both government departments and mining companies realized that is was in the interests of everyone to bring any new policy or project ideas to the Coalition itself as a legitimate stakeholder.
2. Reframe the Debate
Movements shift the discussion around their issues to get people to look at them in a new way. They challenge the prevailing way that these issues are discussed. On justice in climate change, the movement successfully challenged the image that all countries need to curb emissions, pointing out that the industrialized world created the problem and benefited from it, while poorer countries now suffer many of the consequences. The feminist movement challenged the idea that gender roles are fixed and right, substituting the idea that each person has the human right to pursue opportunities in any sphere.
An excellent example of this that I have supported by grantmaking comes from Brazil. The Brazilian government has plans to build 500 dams, most of that on land where farmers and indigenous people have lived for hundreds of years. To most people, the country needs more energy from dams. To those who live in the path of the government’s plans, it looks like “de-development,” moving them backwards into homelessness and poverty. Dam affected people used a variety of tactics to increase their voice and present an alternative point of view. Tactics included:
- alternativetechnical analyses of proposed dams
- publiceducation
- streetprotests
- networkingwith similar groups across the country.
Over many years, the Movement of Dam Affected People in Brazil has successfully altered the debate in Brazil now to see that this is not a debate just about energy, but also about human rights, and treating people right so they do not become the losers in development.
Funders can support this agenda shifting by making grants for alternative technical analysis of issues, alternative media production and distribution, or supporting sustainable businesses that operate in a less destructive manner.
3. Take Advantage of Opportunities
Successful movements both create and take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. Often these opportunities come up suddenly, from some unplanned event. If movements have set up their organizational infrastructure, and figured out how to make a case for shifting the debate, then everything is in place to act when opportunities arise.
An excellent example of this comes from Armenia. Armenian Women For Health And Healthy Environment (AWHHE) conducted educational events on proper handling of pesticides for many years. They produced educational and training materials.
They established contacts with government officials in the Ministries of Agriculture and Public Health. They joined an international network, the Pesticide Action Network, which provided them with many resources – people, technical studies, experience of other organizations, access to United Nations meetings on chemical safety. Yet progress was slow.
The one night fire struck a warehouse storing pesticides in the capital, spreading toxic fumes over the city. Using the opportunity, the group was able to use those contacts, educational material, and deep understanding of the issues to get the government to finally enforce the laws that are in place to regulate pesticides and protect public health.
In It for the Long Haul
So this is a simple framework to help thing about who’s who and what needs to happen to make a movement a success. There are many details in all of this to get into – how to develop leadership? What kind of funds are helpful, and what undermines movement autonomy? Do we all have to be on message, or can we reframe our messages for different audiences? That’s where the genius of activists and their allied funders can be creative and take off. It will not always be clear what to do, in fact it rarely will be. But if we see ourselves as movement funders, then we also behave as movement members, and struggle with partners to make our visions a reality.